Why Are All These People in Boxes?

The first time I saw a woman in a glass box was in The Standard Hotel in Los Angeles, when I went there to profile Judd Apatow. In the lobby, a woman who I guess was around twenty years old was lying down in what looked like a large glass aquarium, wearing a white bikini and checking her e-mail. Right after I checked in, my mother sent me an e-mail, I remember. She was then in Sikkim, one of the poorest regions of India, volunteering at an orphanage. The children all had diarrhea, she wrote to tell me, because they were eating too much nettle soup; the orphanage couldn't afford any better food. I read her e-mail while looking at this girl-in-a-box and I felt both cool and modern and o-so-cosmopolitan, and also like a complete piece of shit. I think that may have been the intended effect.

Recently, two new works of art with very similar approaches have come to public attention. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tilda Swinton is sleeping in a box. She is part of a piece called "The Maybe" by Cornelia Parker. Naturally everyone is comparing it to Marina Abramović's famous "The Artist is Present," where she stared into strangers' eyes for hours a day, and the comparison cannot be good for "The Maybe." Jerry Saltz at New York magazine was particularly brutal:

I'm a sourpuss, so I think this is just a hokey artsy strategy to disguise the fact that the place doesn't have enough room to show its tremendous collection. Visiting there now is unpleasant because the museum has been so overcrowded since its 2004 makeover. The event also has inner content: MoMA is narcissistically puffing its celebrity feathers, playing at being avant-garde.

AP Images

"Jew in a Box" at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Ouch. But Saltz's reaction to "The Maybe" is tepid compared to the reaction inspired by a new exhibit in Berlin's Jewish Museum, which is, you guessed it, "Jew in a Box." I've been to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and it is one of the creepier museums in the world — explaining rituals that happen every week in my house, like Shabbat dinner, as if they were recreations of dinosaur stampedes. The Jews are in the box for two hours. They also talk. Visitors are prompted to ask the Jews-in-the-box (a plural noun I thought I would never have to use) classics like: "Are all Jews religious?" "How does one get to the synagogue on Shabbat?" and "What makes someone Jewish?" (Not getting into a glass box to answer questions by a bunch of Germans would be a pretty good start.) The Jerusalem Postdidn't fail to notice the connection with the Eichmann trial, which was essentially one long German-in-a-box.

Why does just putting a person behind glass cause such a fuss? Jewish people in the lobby of the Jewish Museum answering questions wouldn't be upsetting. Neither would a twenty-year-old in a bikini by the pool of The Standard or even Tilda Swinton sleeping in the lobby of the MOMA. She could probably get away with it. Obviously the anger arises from a very basic question of objectification. When you put someone behind glass, you are turning them into a piece, putting them inside the human equivalent of an aquarium, in a shop window display. We all know, on some very intimate level, that this act is wrong, but we can't stop ourselves from doing it anyway.

Modernity, at least in part, has been defined by two contradictory goals. On the one hand, political liberalism has determined that everybody should be an end-in-him-or-herself. On the other hand, commodity capitalism wants to turn every last body and soul into a product that can be put under glass. The girl in the box in The Standard Hotel was not allowed, by the terms of the artwork, to talk to people in the lobby, even to recognize their existence. The spectators, for their part, were not allowed to take pictures. It evened out the situation. Both sides were supposed to pretend that the other wasn't there. That's part of what made it so glamorous.

The glass boxes in Berlin and in New York are supposedly sites of confrontation, places where viewers are supposed to see others, to acknowledge them. Tilda Swinton is such a perfect choice for "The Maybe" because she's an inscrutably brilliant performer and a visually startling presence. You know who you're seeing in "The Maybe." And in Berlin, I assume, the motivation for the piece was educational, though no doubt twisted and insensitive in execution. But both pieces retain that disconnection that the box in The Standard had. We go to art, perhaps naively, to assuage our sense of isolation. But a glass box cannot bring anything other than alienation. And we have so much of that just walking down the street. Do we really need more of it in museums?

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